Second, at the Amazon AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon revealed a new Internet of Things (IoT) service. The service is geared towards communicating with and powering wearables, sensors, and other small devices listening and measuring the environment around them. To coincide with the launch, a handful of certified devices and sensors were announced as well. One of those devices is the Qualcomm Dragonboard, a 96Boards compliant 64-bit ARM single board computer. While this may not seem like a big deal at first glance, it actually dramatically increases the number of 64-bit ARM Linux devices out in the wild. The size, scale, and marketing efforts of the Amazon AWS platform will serve to increase adoption and increase the user base.

Finally, the Linaro Connect bi-annual meeting was held in San Francisco, where ARM, Linaro, and many of the industry and ecosystem partners got together to discuss all things Linux on ARM. As usual, one day of the conference was entirely devoted to the Server ecosystem, with talks and discussions specifically focused on enterprise applications and hardware. Many, many resources were made available for everyone to review here: http://connect.linaro.org/sfo15/

Of course, to get familiar with 64-bit Linux on ARM, be sure to check out our 96Boards HiKey server running Debian 8 Jessie!